


And All of This, Exactly That

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Dragons, F/F, F/M, M/M, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-27
Updated: 2010-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-31 00:11:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the end, Rachel Elisabeth Dare should have just stuck to being a cat lady. It would have saved her a lot of trouble, and also, her eyebrows have never grown back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And All of This, Exactly That

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the pjo_xchange! avid_reader1029 prompted me with "succumb, checkmate, and methinks the lady doth protest too much".
> 
> Spoilers for The Last Olympian. You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/96891.html).

-

 

_white snow, falling down  
falling (fast!)  
hits the ground_

 

**one.**

Around the time November fades into December and the Christmas lights go up all around New York City like ghosts popping out of the earth -- beginning with the magnificent show at Rockefeller Center and spreading to the gaudy, block-long displays down in Brooklyn -- Percy Jackson grows a beard.

Apparently it happens while no one is looking, the same way that the first ten days of the month slip by when you're not paying attention and suddenly those deadlines are _right there_ instead of comfortably far away like they should be, and the first time Rachel sees Percy after Fall Break, he's got a full-on philosopher's beard, which he scratches at meditatively while perusing his choices of espresso flavors at the coffee shop in Borders.

"If I hadn't been right there watching him ditch shaving every morning in favor of five extra minutes sleep, I would have said he'd been cursed," says Annabeth, up against the condiments counter, half-concentrating on the forms she's filling out. Her slightly vicious tone makes the holiday shopper stirring Splenda into her coffee look over uneasily, but Rachel flashes her a smile to show all is well.

"You don't like it, I take it?" she ventures, when the lady tosses her straw wrapper into the trash and wanders off.

Annabeth snorts. Loudly. "He looks like a caveman."

"A very well-groomed caveman," Rachel points out. "And Brooklyn doesn't have two n's."

"I _know_ that, I only put -- oh," Annabeth frowns, and flips over her pencil to scrub at her paper with the eraser. "I didn't realize I already put one."

"Dyslexia acting up?" Rachel goes, sympathetic, and abruptly feels like one of the middle-aged maids she grew up with, always complaining about their bad hips. She grimaces. If she and Annabeth grow up to be _that_ kind of friend, she'll do something drastic. Like swallow paint.

Annabeth, fortunately, doesn't seem to realize that Rachel was briefly replaced with an imitation forty-year-old pod person. She brushes away eraser bits with an airy flick of her hand. "He says it's warmer this way. Suppose it's like when girls don't shave their thighs in winter. What the hell," she adds, squinting at the form. "No, I don't know this shit off the top of my head. You wouldn't happen to have a calculator on you, would you?"

"Yeah, no, not since high school," when going around playing Tetris on their graphing calculators was the most fun the freshmen could come up with. Most of what Rachel remembers about the 2006-2007 school year is usually preempted with her humming the Tetris theme song. She knows her true friends from her fairweather ones in that her true ones are right there along with her, humming without question.

Like Annabeth is now, she realizes, and Percy, too, coming up behind them with a coffee in each hand, both of them with their mouths cheerfully pursed over the "d" consonant in the continuous stream of "do do do do do..."

Percy drops one of the coffees over Annabeth's shoulder, presenting it right under her nose, and Rachel can't really look at him and think anything beyond, _Beard._

"Ooo, caffeine!" says Annabeth, taking it and immediately putting her mouth to it, getting a brush of whipped cream all over her upper lip for her trouble. "Because it's not like we don't bounce off the walls already."

The Beard parts, long enough for a flash of teeth to come through as Percy grins and replies, "Yes, but now we can do it faster and with bad breath."

"Point," she concedes, already folding up the forms -- I didn't even ask what they were for, Rachel realizes -- and tucking them inside her peacoat, careless of bent corners. She flips her scarf over her shoulder and the two of them leave, waving and tossing, "it was good seeing you again, Rachel"s over their shoulders. She stands there by the napkins and the coffee lids, her hand still lifted in a return wave, long after their familiar figures have disappeared out into the winter grey.

 

**two.**

On the drive home, Rachel puts Virginia on speakerphone. In the driver's seat, Marlon -- who's known her since Tamara Dare held her for the very first time, put a fingertip to her nose and went, "hmm," in her signature vague and displeased way -- tosses an amused look in her direction, which Rachel merely returns with a raised eyebrow, because please, he likes Virginia's accent as much as she does, and he's not fooling anyone.

The Dare's vehicle (one of them, at any rate; her father went through a stage in his mid-forties when he bought a small fleet of life-affirming hot red sports cars, but they mostly sit waiting for him in a garage in upstate Pennsylvania, being taken care of by a very friendly retired veteran who won the job from Mr. Dare in a back-door draw) is a classic, sleek, black Jaguar, complete with the rounded headlights and the white-walled wheels, like it'd come straight out of a photograph. It's a bit cumbersome for Manhattan streets, but the way Marlon washes and waxes it, it'd be a bit mean to _not_ let him drive it.

Rachel reaches for the glove department, fishing out a pair of sunglasses she may or may not have blackmailed Nico into stealing from Tom Hardy, because, please, it wasn't like he was going to miss them and Rachel's a virgin, not _dead,_ and she can feel cool wearing some hot actor's stolen sunglasses.

For all that there are probably unspoken higher-class rules about hired drivers and old Jaguars, Rachel has never once sat in the backseat, not since she was old enough to clear the safety-line for the passenger seat airbag. Being escorted is boring. Riding shotgun is not. The distinction is that simple.

"So when are your finals?" Virginia asks, a clatter in the background suggesting that she's talking and trying to put together pans for pot roast at the same time. 

"Girl," Rachel protests. "Finals aren't for another two weeks, why are you asking me this."

"Well, I have juries on the 14th, so unlike some people with very boring, straight-forward majors, I have to actually start putting things together now. It's not like I can memorize an entire Italian aria in one night."

"Sure you can," Rachel goes dismissively, though she has, in fact, seen the kinds of pieces Virginia likes to sing, and knows there's no way anyone could memorize those overnight. Virginia isn't one to do things by halves.

"Right, so, I was wondering if you were free on Thursday. I could drag you to Kinko's so I can make copies of my song, then we can snag a study carousel at the library and get a head-start on our review sheets."

Next to her, Marlon makes a noise in the back of his throat, quickly stifled with the back of his hand. Rachel stares at her cell phone.

"You are _so_ not a half-blood," she remarks, disbelieving.

"I am too," Virginia goes assertively. "Want to know how you can tell? Because I am trying to make dinner and keep my home's corded phone against my ear at the same time, because if I used a cell phone, by eleven o' clock tonight, I'd have to be explaining to the police that sure, they could say it was a gas leak, but it was probably some giant, fire-breathing, half-blood eating monster that blew up the house. It's very difficult, I keep getting tangled."

"Your life is so hard, I don't know how you do it."

"Okay, now you're just being mean, you redheaded tart. I'll see you Thursday, then," and hangs up before Rachel can even put in that she hadn't actually agreed to the study session.

She closes the phone and tucks it back into the inside pocket of her coat. The Jaguar goes hissing through the slush, close enough to the curb to make the people walking there step smartly to the side to avoid getting any on their shoes.

"She's right, you know, Little Miss Annie," Marlon finally offers. He's been calling her that since she was five, wearing ugly brass-clasped red Mary Janes and white tights at her mother's behest, her strawberry-blonde curls everywhere in a distinguishing manner, one that her her father looking at his wife with something like suspicion, as neither of them had been carrot tops as children. _Come on, Little Miss Annie,_ Marlon had said consolingly, when he invariably found her hiding in his office room off the garage, pulling the queens out of all his decks of playing cards because she liked them best. _You shouldn't make Daddy Warbucks worry about you._

_Yes, I should,_ she'd answered, rebelliously rubbing at her eyes. Very little about this exchanged varied over the next eleven years.

"Boring and straight-forward your curriculum may be," Marlon continues gently, "it's nothing you should be putting off until the last minute."

"No, I know," Rachel sighs. There'd practically been fairy lights in her father's eyes when he'd seen how cutthroat the competition would be in Rachel's field of study. _My daughter, she's training to be a surgeon,_ she'd become to all of his fair-weather friends and colleagues, no matter how Rachel tried to protest that she was just studying to get her undergrad in biology and that didn't even mean she was going to be a doctor, much less a surgeon, but something had unbalanced all those years ago, when her father won his first victory over her about the St. Clarion's thing and since then had been unstoppable in his efforts to shape her future.

And anyway, Rachel supposes it doesn't matter what she does with her mortal life, so long as it keeps her in the state so she can be on hand to deliver do-or-die prophecies to handicapped kids in the summer, so, doctor it is.

"You and Percy are taking most of the same classes," Marlon puts in helpfully. The car in front of them peels out as the light turns green, splattering flecks of gray all over the Jaguar's window. Unperturbed, Marlon flicks on the windshield wipers. "Perhaps you should invite him to the library on Thursday, too."

"Only if you want the library blown up," Rachel responds, more cuttingly than she intends to. Sparing perhaps Marguerite -- the only maid who survived Tamara Dare's tendency to fire anything that breathed wrong -- Marlon probably knows her best out of anyone, and he seems to take the evidence that Percy likes Annabeth's tongue in his mouth and nobody else's as incidental at best. He clued into something when she was fifteen, and he sees whatever he wants to see in every interaction since then. His transparent hope for her got annoying after the first five minutes.

But Percy's studying to become a doctor, too, and this is another reason Rachel thinks she might just stick with it: if she switches majors, she knows for a fact Percy won't last a semester. There's too much textbook memorization in biology, anatomy, and statistics for his magpie mind to get around on its own. And she knows that Percy wants to specialize in childhood diseases, so he'll be able to spot the half-bloods for who they are before they start seeing through the Mist, and before the monsters start seeing them.

And because she's thinking about him, her phone begins vibrating in her pocket, loudly declaring itself to be too sexy for its shirt. She sighs and fishes it out, because speaking of half-bloods who can only call her from their unwieldy home phones.

"Annabeth doesn't like your beard," she says by way of greeting.

"You lying skank," he goes instantly, without heat. "Annabeth loves my beard."

In the background, she hears Annabeth herself make a loud, strangled noise, like she's trying to admonish Percy and Rachel at once but can't quite get their names out simultaneously. The frustration with Percy must win, because the next thing she hears is "focus!" and Rachel's "no, she really doesn't" is cut off by Percy's, "Right, are you busy?"

"Um," Rachel answers, glancing sideways at Marlon, but he's already got a hand on the signal, maneuvering into the left-hand turn lane that'll take them down to Queens.

 

**three.**

In order to afford an apartment in the greater metropolis area on their practically non-existent salary, Percy and Annabeth rent a third-floor one-bedroom in perhaps the only area of real estate that manages to be nowhere near any major landmark, anything _interesting,_ or perhaps remotely colorful, which Rachel thought was nigh-impossible in New York. Their neighborhood looks like the kind of place the Godfather would have taken someone to pop them, but she supposes for Percy and Annabeth, constantly putting your life in jeopardy just going to get bread, milk, and eggs might even be comforting.

Marlon's dropped her off here so many times he's mostly managed to quell the look like this is the last time he's ever going to see her. She waves, tugging her scarf out of the way of the closing door and turning to let herself into the building, set as it is behind cast-iron bars and guarded by a squint-eyed superintendent. 

There's a looseleaf sign attached to the apartment door, upon which "P. Jackson and A. Chase," has been etched in block-lettered Sharpie. Underneath it, what was obviously intended to be a smiley face has been warped into an angry face with pointy eyebrows and far too many teeth. 

"Come in, it's unlocked!" Annabeth yells in response to her knock.

"And non-hazardous!" Percy adds. Rachel, who'd just been about to ask that, bites her lip and twists at the doorknob. Once, when Percy, Annabeth, and a half-blood whose name Rachel is still not entirely sure about, since prophecy never helpfully mentions names, got stuck in a snowstorm in Montana, she'd been asked via Iris-message if she could please check on the apartment, and found a small, burgeoning colony of mosquitoes living in the sink, which was humid-warm and moldy. It'd been one of the most unpleasant things she'd ever seen, and this was coming from the girl who _had_ seen Kronos possess Luke.

She has never let Percy live it down. "Good," she calls, stomping the slush off her boots in the entryway. "I left my bio-hazard suit at the dry-cleaner's." They aren't in the front room, which means they're in the kitchen. "What's going on?"

"You should come see this," Annabeth goes. The apartment is clean, which Rachel supposes is something Sally Jackson hammered into Percy to make up for his lack of other important survival skills, like common sense. Half-bloods don't seemed inclined towards cleanliness naturally, if their cabins are anything to go by. There are icicle-white Christmas lights strung all around the windows, and an unopened box standing in a corner, looking like it's just been dragged out of storage. The Christmas tree, Rachel recognizes; one of her own hand-me-downs. It'll sit there for another two weeks before Percy and Annabeth do anything with it.

"Is it a dead body? I firmly refuse to dispose of dead bodies for you at any point before nightfall, because I don't actually like being seen carrying corpses on the -- what is _that?"_

_That_ is glaringly obvious the second she enters the room. Usually, the first thing her eyes are drawn to in Percy and Annabeth's kitchen is the plaque hanging above the sink: it's got a cartoon T-Rex on it, crying and saying, "all my friends are dead." (It'd been a gift from Nico, she'd found out since, and while yes, she supposes it's a miracle they've got Nico to function like a normal human being at all, apparently Appropriate Gift-Giving was the kind of advanced etiquette he was never going to learn.)

This time, all focus in the room is immediately drawn to the giant pot on the stove. It's bigger than a soup pot, bigger than the pot Marguerite uses to brine the turkey at Thanksgiving; big enough to cover two burners, each of them glowing coal-red underneath it. She can feel the heat of it hit her where she's standing.

"Well, I suppose boiling a dead body would help get rid of it," she says, but she's not really paying attention to what she's saying. 

Something rattles inside the pot, banging hollowly. Against the counter, on the other side of the island and as far away from the pot as the kitchen will allow, Percy and Annabeth look at each other helplessly. She slides around him, grabbing Rachel's sleeve as she goes and tugging her over to the pot. When she lifts the lid, steam billows out, curling against the ceiling in a great mushroom cloud of white; Rachel shields her face against the worst of it, and after it clears, she leans in.

"Is that --" she goes, eyes bulging.

"Don't even ask," Annabeth replies.

It's an egg. It looks like a block of oblong stone, gypsum-colored, sitting in the middle of bubbling hot water. It's also huge, which she suppose explains the ginormous pot.

"So ... what kind of omelet are we making?" she says, somewhat feebly.

"We're not cooking it," comes from somewhere in her peripheral, the Beard moving with the words.

"We're raising it," says Annabeth.

Rachel cuts her eyes at her. She's got her hair pulled back, growing-out bangs held in place with bobby pins, and she looks different than she had at Border's, now that she's not wearing her coat or her scarf, transformed in that way people tend to be during winter. Right underneath her chin, there's a blotchy red patch, like road rash or hives, and Rachel's about to dismiss it when she notices that there's a small ring of purple in the middle, like a posy-mark. Completely inappropriately, her mind flashes to Percy's beard and she feels herself flush all over. It's a hickey, she realizes, and it's embarrassing that it's enough to fully distract her from the fact they have a _giant egg_ hard-boiling on the stove, but there you have it.

There's no point getting weird about it, she tells herself quickly, looking away, knowing they'll excuse the flush on account of all the steam. There's nothing to be weird about. Honestly, girl, it's just a hickey.

After all, Percy and Annabeth pretty much have sex like it's their day job. Rachel knows this; it's perfectly normal, it's what regular people do, and it's always been a foregone conclusion with Percy and Annabeth -- they've been all over each other since they were sixteen, and everybody just sort of amusedly tolerates it, because that's the kind of ending this story gets. 

Just because Rachel's never going to have sex doesn't mean she needs to fixate on people who do.

And while the objective part of her keeps on tartly reminding her of this, and that lots of people have sex so frequently it might as well qualify as training for an Olympic sport, there's another part of her that still feels like the silly fourteen-year-old schoolgirl whenever she's around them, the one that never looks left or right in the locker room and still gets chip crumbs down the front of her shirt. She feels like there's always going to be that line there: this side is for the cool people who routinely have sex with their significant others, and this is the side for everybody who did not pass must-be-this-tall-to-ride. And maybe Percy and Annabeth can't see it now that they've crossed it, but Rachel can -- and there's always going to be that part of them that she'll never understand, and while Rachel knows that's healthy, it also makes her sad, and more than a little lonely.

"What, exactly, are you raising?" she goes, forcibly dragging herself back into the conversation, before she does something horribly stupid, like ask if a beard is worse than stubble-burn. Is beard-burn even a term?

"It's a dragon egg," Annabeth says grimly, mouth wire-thin and her eyes reflecting the fog, swimmingly grey.

"I beg your pardon?"

"We've always thought Peleus was a boy, but apparently it's like Jurassic Park and dragons can change gender in a single-sex environment," pipes up Percy, speaking very quickly. "Or, rather, if they're the only dragon around, they can asexually reproduce. And we volunteered to hatch and train the offspring, to get it used to human contact."

"'We' volunteered?" echoes Annabeth. "What is this 'we'? I don't recall volunteering for anything, and now we've got a dragon egg to take care of. Thanks to you and your big mouth, you --"

"Um," interjects Rachel, because if she lets them, they can snipe at each other until the cows come home. "Sorry, but what use am I in this?"

The two of them look at each other for a long moment.

"Well," Percy begins. "You own cats, don't you?"

 

**four.**

She had a vaguely horrified moment in which she thought they wanted to _feed_ Aladdin and Jasmine to the baby dragon (how is she supposed to know what it eats? for all she knows, it _will_ eat fat, lazy indoor cats) and once they loudly reassure her that's not what they meant -- they were merely wondering if she had any extra pet stuff lying around: bedding, cans of cat food, small toys that neither of her cats are using.

The way they said it makes Rachel think they don't have the first clue what they're doing, which, hey, no change there.

"Yeah, I'll see what I can do," she goes faintly, and goes downstairs to call Marlon.

Rachel lives in a three-story old world house in the heart of downtown, with a terrace that opens out onto a smog-free view of the Manhattan skyline; the kind of multi-million dollar real estate that you can only buy if you're a movie star, dirty international arms dealer, or a cutthroat land development mogul like William Dare, Esq. (or something hoity-toity like that; Rachel's never actually paid her father enough attention to really determine what titles he might or might not have. She just knows he's Very Very Rich, and it's always completely mortifying to be the offspring of people like that, especially once they get into Times magazine's Top 100 People of the Year and suddenly everyone knows who she is, from the broomsweep in the deli to random-ass cab drivers in middle-of-nowhere Colorado.)

When she gets home, there are suitcases lined up just inside the parlor, which Marlon quickly and efficiently relocates out to the Jag. Rachel looks up, and sure enough, her dad's coming down the staircase, scowling at his latest hand-held gadget and carrying a plain black travel pillow around his neck. Rachel has one too, but hers has Snoopy on it.

In his old age, William Dare likes to spend the winter months in their vacation home in Majorca, and he comes home sometime in March smelling of aloe vera and complaining about the European political climate. Recently, Rachel's been subtly hinting that they maybe should sell the Majorca home and start looking at property in the US Virgin Islands, thinking (not without some amount of irony and more than a little selfishness) that it might be someplace she could send Percy and Annabeth on their honeymoon -- far enough away to feel like a proper getaway, but still on US soil, so they'd be an Iris call away if somebody blew something up or got eaten.

She meets him half-way down the stairs, and he startles, like he wasn't expecting her to crop up, but then the lines around his eyes smooth out almost imperceptibly.

"Hi, sweetheart," he greets her in his slow sugar-mollasses voice. He hefts his phone up, showing her the complex spread of options on the screen. "They always tell you these new thing-a-ma-bobs will make your hectic life easier, but by the time I master one, they've already gone on to something new and then I have to learn _that_ one, and let me tell you, it doesn't make my life easier at all!"

He goes off, grumbling about all this newfangled technology and how they just don't make it how they used to, and a sudden wave of affection for her father strikes Rachel out of nowhere. Mr. Dare had been born in middle-of-nowhere Rhode Island to mixed-race Trinidadian parents, and when she was growing up, she knew he was watching to see when she'd start looking like him -- his mocha-colored skin, dark eyes, broad basketball shoulders. But Rachel stayed small, runty, pasty-white all the way through her teenage years.

By now, she thinks they've wordlessly accepted the fact that Tamara Dare, wherever she is, probably did not give birth to her husband's child, but it actually doesn't seem to matter a whole bunch, not in the world-ending way it'd seemed when she was fifteen.

"Merry Christmas, Daddy," she goes, and while she's still suffering this strange, touchy-feely moment, she stands up on tiptoes and presses a kiss to his cheek.

He smiles at her, startled, surprised, and maybe even a little shy. "Merry Christmas to you, too, darling. You know you're more than welcome to join me any time you get tired of the snow. Oh, did you already take all my bags out?" This last is directed at Marlon, who materializes obediently at the bottom of the stairs. "Good man! I appreciate it."

"Not a problem, sir," goes Marlon, tossing a wink at Rachel as William descends the rest of the stairs, passing him and heading out into the sapphire-colored late afternoon light. "You behave while we're gone, Little Miss Annie, you hear? I'll be back in a couple hours, try not to destroy anything or steal any helicopters until then."

"Yeah, yeah," Rachel flaps a hand at him.

Marlon throws his head back and laughs. He's got blue eyes, a cleft chin, and hair that curls into view in spry autumn colors. Rachel has all these things too.

 

**five.**

The rest of the week passes. Rachel worries it might be a little hazardous to have a giant, constantly-boiling pot on the stove, but what's the point of having a son of Poseidon living in the apartment if he can't refill the water in the pot and dissolve the steam into nothingness with a snap of his fingers. As for the energy being eaten up with having the stove heat set to high day and night, well, they eat a lot of cold cereal and microwavable burritos, and Percy starts practicing how to hoodwink the superintendent using the Mist to get him to think the energy spike's actually coming from the next-door neighbor, because, "he watches weird, Asian lesbian porn way too loudly at completely indecent times of day," Percy says, scowling at the far wall like the neighbor can see it through plywood. "And by indecent times of day, I mean dinnertime, when I have my mother and Paul over and we're trying to discuss my credit hours over casseroles while Busty Asian Beauty number one is wailing like a banshee. He deserves an inflated utilities bill."

Whatever her misgivings about raising a dragon in the middle of New York City, Rachel has to admit she kind of loves this; eating breakfast and reading the Google News headlines to Marguerite, then going home with Percy after the last class of the day, and staying there until well after nightfall. She hasn't spent this much time in Percy and Annabeth's company since they were sixteen.

"I always feel so bad, making Marlon drive all the way down here every night," Percy says one night, holding her coat up so she can get her arms into the sleeves.

She waves this off, pulling her hair out from under the collar. "He really doesn't mind. He thinks we've been shagging since that one time you were naked with the cats and the watermelon."

"That was completely innocent," Percy says, kneejerk, like it's been drilled into him as the automatic response since childhood. "Which I could have told him if you'd stopped laughing long enough to let me do so. Also, I don't know what shagging means."

"It's Brit for sex," Annabeth's voice announces from the kitchen.

Something storm-colored happens in Percy's eyes at that, and she can't tell through the Beard, but he's probably blushing. Rachel grins at him, the cattiest smile she can draw up, formed from weeks of being forcefully taught by the Aphrodite girls, who, quote, "think it's a waste when redheads simply aren't aware of their own incredible sex appeal."

"Ah, right. Well, that's going to make things awkward now, because I won't be able to look at him without remembering that he pictures me and you naked."

"Oh my God, shut up," Rachel laughs, forgetting in her immediate awkward flush to pluralize her deity. "He does not, you creep. He just doesn't want me to grow up to be a spinster, living alone with thirty thousand cats, and since you haven't been arrested on a felony charge yet, he thinks you're all right, although personally, he and Marguerite would be much happier if I brought Annabeth home and kissed her under the mistletoe."

"I will gladly snog you under any plant in the name of thrilling your household staff," Annabeth says solemnly, appearing next to her, her scarf in hand, and the thing is, Rachel can't quite tell if she's kidding.

That Friday, she's in the middle of drooling on her notes in American History Up To 1850 -- the only Friday class she has and the only one she does _not_ share with Percy -- when her phone goes off, cutting off the teacher in the middle of something about the Union Pacific Railroad with loud declarations of its own sexiness. The class's titters follow her as she moonwalks out.

"What's up, chicken butt," she goes in the hallway.

"Hi, you might want to know you're an auntie. Congratulations!" 

She startles badly. "The egg hatched?!" she hisses, just barely remembering to keep her voice down.

"Well, not yet, it's been kind of a slow process, but you should definitely get here as soon as possible."

"You better not be leaving my incredibly scintillating lecture for a booty call, Rachel," the professor says, drumming his fingers on the podium when she comes back in to collect her stuff.

It takes her two tries to get her pencils back into her bag, she's so excited. "Actually, no sir," she goes, flushing red to her ears as the whole class laughs again. "My friends are ... uh, having a baby."

"That's a word for booty call I've never heard before." And Rachel flushes further, because honestly, not everything in college is about _sex_ (except for the fact it totally is, but none of it is applicable to Rachel for reasons they'll never understand.)

It takes nearly an hour to fight lunch-hour traffic, and she shuts the door on Marlon's "what do you mean, I'm not allowed to come up and see the kittens _Rachel do they have a meth lab you don't want me to see--"_ and takes the stairs two at a time.

The first thing she notices is the abrupt lack of heat in the apartment; it's no longer like walking right into a sauna. The second thing she notices, rounding the corner into the kitchen, are the two halves of the gypsum shell, lying abandoned on the island countertop. Her eyes immediately snap to the other end, where Percy and Annabeth are both crouched to be eye level with --

It's about the size of a kitten, and it's tripping over itself like one, catching its four stubbly legs under it and swaying precariously, eyelids translucently thin and hanging heavy over its eyes the way all infants do. It's a minty-green color, darker at its muzzle and along the nubbly ridge down its spine to its tail, and paler along the membrane of its tiny, tiny, postage-stamp sized wings. Its underbelly is the color of buttercream, and glowing in soft pulses like an ember.

"Oh," Rachel breathes, pulling her gloves off her fingers one-by-one and forgetting she'd already done that and so tugs uselessly at her fingertips for a second. "Is that --"

"Yes, it is," goes Annabeth, all soft-voiced and doe-eyed in a way Rachel's never seen from her, and then the baby dragon opens its mouth and mewls, piteously and high, just like a kitten, and then she understands that soppy look immediately, because it is possibly the most adorable thing in the history of ever. The little dragon goes tottering towards Annabeth, who catches it underneath its belly before it can fall off the edge of the counter. 

"Hey, now, none of that," she goes, both hands fluttering to hold the dragon as it immediately begins to try and squirm out of her hold, crying in distress. She puts it back on the countertop, where it immediately heads right for the edge again.

Percy, who's standing somewhat helplessly nearby with a half-open can of cat food in his hand, looks over at Rachel. "Do you think it might be hungry, or ..."

"How should I know?" Rachel spreads her hands. "I've never hatched a dragon before, and I don't think there's a WikiHelp section about it." She remembers the first time her parents put Aladdin into her hands, a tiny tawny ball of fluff and itty teeth, and she'd realized there was more to raising animals than carrying them around everywhere and loving them with her whole heart. They needed certain kinds of foods, something comforting from their litter, around-the-clock attention. And she bets dragons are just as complicated.

"Guys!" Annabeth goes to get their attention. She forms a barricade with her hands to keep the hatchling on the countertop. "One of you go get my laptop, I've got a couple things bookmarked."

"Oh," says Percy.

"On raising dragons?" says Rachel, incredulous.

"It's Daedalus's laptop," Percy reminds her. "If anything would have a Wiki page on dragon care, it would be that."

Since she's closest, Rachel shrugs her shoulders and goes to fetch it off the sofa. She recognizes it by the delta symbol on the cover, in place of a company logo. She settles onto the cushion, popping the lid open. The laptop whirs to life. When the desktop loads, it shows a background image of someplace she assumes to be in Greece, judging by the building structure and the spindly olive trees, and by simple rote of who it belongs to. She fingers at the touchpad, seeing the cursor appear, but she can't find a start bar, or any desktop icons.

"Okay," she mutters under her breath, whirling the cursor around the screen pointlessly. "I can't look anything up if I can't figure out how your wonky software works."

At that moment, a figure appears inside the building onscreen. She blinks, lifting away from the touchpad, but the figure keeps approaching, walking out of the ancient Greek structure on the desktop and coming towards her, growing larger as if he really is coming closer from a distance, like the laptop screen is a window.

"Hello," the figure says out of the speakers, stopping and then taking a seat in the desktop corner, crossing his legs under him. He's got Greek sandals laced up to his knees, and his robes are hemmed in purple, the way the rich and affluent used to wear it back then, due to the rarity of violet dyes. He has a mass of curly dark hair: he looks a little like Percy did at thirteen.

"Hello," Rachel answers for lack of anything else to do.

"Rachel Elisabeth Dare," the boy continues, tilting sideways and leaning up against the side of the screen like he knows exactly where it is. "How may I help you today? You have three unread messages in your Hotmail account and one message on your Facebook Wall from a Virginia Gregory."

"Oh gods, Virginia," she groans, dropping her forehead into the heels of her hands. "I completely forgot I was supposed to go to a study session with her yesterday. Oh, man, she probably cussed all over my Wall. My _dad_ sees that."

"Would you like me to open a reply page?" the boy on the screen asks politely.

Rachel blinks at him. "Um, wait, you do that?"

"I am your Icarus Help Desk representative," the boy nods. "I am here to assist you in any way you need."

He's like the little paperclip on Microsoft Word, Rachel realizes, the one she tries to kill with her cursor every time it tries to ask her what she's doing when she's neck-deep in term papers and doesn't want its smug little eyeballs watching her creepily. Icarus, her mind provides her with, the son of Daedalus who got too carried away and melted all the wax on his wings, plummeting to a violent and gruesome death while his father watched; the kind of wholesome stories the ancient Greeks liked to tell their kids. This must be him, she thinks, studying his features.

He arches an eyebrow questioningly.

Another high-pitched cry comes from the kitchen. Percy yelps in pain, and Annabeth's wry "I really don't think it wants cat food, stupid," follows, refocusing Rachel's attention.

"Right, no, I want -- I want to make a search," she says, wondering if this is how she is supposed to phrase it. Icarus stands up, giving her an encouraging look. "Um, how to care for a newly hatched dragon?"

"Ah, of course," says Icarus, "your recently bookmarked sites." He reaches behind him and then throws a window up onto the screen. The page loads; it looks like it might be an Internet search, except the address in the address bar is a local file, and everything is in Greek.

"Erm," she frowns. "Icarus?"

He appears in the corner of the screen again. "Yes, Rachel Elisabeth Dare?"

"Can you translate it into English?"

"Ah, of course," and within the next blink, English words scroll across the screen, replacing the Greek.

"And how do you have access to my Hotmail account and Facebook, anyway?" she grumbles, scanning the headings as they load.

"I am your Icarus Help Desk representative," the boy says, ever polite. "I am here to assist you in any way you need."

"Never mind."

She barges back into the kitchen a few minutes later, catching the tail end of Annabeth's, "-- I wonder if they imprint. Maybe not, considering asexual reproduction is a frog thing and frogs don't really care for their offspring. But it's so warm, it's hard to believe it's a reptile. And methinks you doth protest too much," she adds, this time to the dragon, who has completely bypassed the little saucer of milk they've put in front of it and is now gumming uselessly at a sponge.

"I've got it," Rachel interrupts, circling around the other end of the kitchen island and picking up the halves of the gypsum shell. _Yes,_ she thinks triumphantly: except for the area right at the top where the dragon cracked through, the inside of the egg is cushioned with a thick, mucosal layer. "It explains why the egg was so big and the baby dragon so small. It's supposed to eat all of this, and then you can start feeding it solid foods."

"What kind of solids?" Annabeth scoops the dragon up under its glowing belly. It protests, but only tokenly, because when she sets it next to its egg shell, it makes a distinctively happy squeak and tips muzzle-first into it.

"Anything, they're omnivorous."

"Excellent," comes from Percy's direction. "I always wanted a walking dispose-all system."

"You stupid creature," goes Annabeth affectionately, as the dragon tilts its head sideways to munch on the egg-white residue. "Hatch out of an egg and then forget it's there. I don't need another kelp head to look after."

"I resent that," says Percy without any kind of resentment at all. He loops an arm around Rachel's shoulder and holds out the other for Annabeth, who comes to his side, rolling her eyes. He hugs them close for a moment, watching the dragon eat with growing ease. "So," he goes. "Do you think it's kosher to have a baby shower _after_ we become parents? I could really go with some free gifts right now."

Annabeth wrestles him into a headlock; he shouts loud enough to startle the dragon, who squeaks, a puff of smoke coming up from its nostrils.

 

**six.**

The dragon grows slowly, skittering around the house with the click-click of claws and bumping loudly against walls with hindquarters, wings, and tail, and weeks later, they're still arguing about a name.

They vetoed Norbert without even really discussing it, but considering Icarus can't help them with any way to identify a dragon's gender, they can't really decide on anything else when they're still uncertain if they've got a boy hatchling or a girl hatchling.

"It's not right to do that to him," Percy protests. "We can't name him a girl's name if he isn't a girl, it'll give him a complex."

"Who says she's a him?" Rachel fires back.

Around finals week, curled up on their sofa with her iPod in, she absently snaps her fingers down at ground-level when she sees the familiar flick of a tail in her peripheral and says, "Hey, girl," and can't help but blink in astonishment when the dragon comes over, nosing at her curiously with her oven-hot nose, and from then on, Rachel can't call her anything else but Hey Girl.

Never one to let things lie, Percy calls her Hey Boy and always uses the male pronoun, which earns them more than one confused look to the people who eavesdrop in on them in class. Everybody seems to be under the impression that they own a very temperamental, gender-confused dog.

Rachel thought that Annabeth would side with her, simply because Annabeth's got no truck with sexism and tends to react with volatile ferocity in the face of anything she perceives to be misogyny, but, being Annabeth, she seems to take the fact that they expect her to make a choice as her excuse not to make one at all, and instead calls the dragon variations of Hey Dumbshit, Shut Up, and You Miserable Lizard Don't Do That.

"You're definitely going to have a complex when you grow up," Rachel tells the dragon, who coos in happy response to her voice and nestles down against her side, wings tucked up against her shoulders and her belly glowing contentedly.

In the first couple weeks, she goes from the size of a kitten to roughly the size of a standard poodle, eye-level with Rachel's belt. She hasn't yet seemed to discover the fact that she's got wings or what to do with them, but she has discovered that her claws are sharp enough to scratch and draw blood. Percy's got the red, raised lines on his chin to prove it.

"I am going to love you forever," Annabeth tells the dragon, reaching around Rachel to snag a bit of fat from the corned beef she's preparing. Rachel chases her with the prongs and the T-Rex cries at them from the plaque above the sink, but Annabeth's already tossed the fat bit to Hey Girl, who gobbles it up delightedly.

"Strong words," Rachel comments.

"Yeah, but Percy's in the bathroom shaving that beard off right now," she goes, tone as dreamy as she ever gets. "Says he doesn't want to get anything else caught in there."

Rachel glances down at the dragon. "Good girl!" she exclaims, and Hey Girl thumps against the cabinet doors with her tail in response.

Eventually, she's going to need open space, somewhere to learn how to fly. Rachel's home is huge, but there isn't much of a lawn: they've got a wrought-iron fence surrounding their property, autumn leaves rotting where the grass used to grow. It's not really the idyllic place.

"I suppose we'll have to take her to Camp, maybe turn her over to some of the year-rounders until we can head up there come summer break," Percy settles for eventually, rubbing at his clean-shaven chin like he's still searching for the hair that should be there. The thought visibly upsets them all, so much so that Hey Girl clues into it, whimpering low in her throat.

Rachel reaches out, catching against her neck, and Hey Girl spins to butt her head into the caress. "Maybe we'll just run away with you," she murmurs, and sees Percy and Annabeth smiling in the corners of her vision.

 

**seven.**

Annabeth's hair smells like the aromatherapy candles her stepmom keeps sending her on the insistence that she use them to achieve spiritual health (Annabeth mostly just uses them to keep the apartment warm rather than be environmentally unfriendly by asking the heating to go above a certain temperature, because Grover has ways of checking these things and a wide variety of disapproving expressions, so as a result, her hair tends to smell like smoke and odd combinations of rosemary and chamomile.)

Rachel knows this, because Annabeth's standing right behind her the first time Hey Girl accidentally achieves flame, and strangely, the smell of her hair the only thing on her mind when, sitting closeby, the dragon sneezes, hiccoughs, and then burps, looking up at exactly the right moment to belch fire at her face. Percy and Annabeth both scream, eyes big, huge, glittering wide, and Rachel has enough time to think that terror is a good look on them, before fire obscures her vision and everything goes black.

When she wakes up, it's to the feel of cold stinging needles against her skin. _Shower?_ she wonders, and after a moment of careful observation, decides that that's right. She's flat on her back in the shower, and oddly enough, she's naked. She's not sure how that happened, although she takes a moment to be embarrassed that she hasn't shaved in a week, because whoever got her naked must have felt that.

And it's cold. The shower water is running solely on the blue side, she thinks. Even if she can't see it, it certainly feels that way, and it's kind of hard to breathe, like she's sucking through a straw.

"Hey, hey, no, don't do that," someone starts, the instant she tries to sit up. Her vision is clearing in stages, dim-edged like silver light, but when she focuses, she can see Annabeth crouching down next to her, momentarily blocking the spray. She's only wearing a bra and underwear, Rachel notices, somewhat curiously. They're a plain style and a plain color -- the "I'm comfortable with you" kind, and even though she knows they're not for her, her heart lifts at the sight of them anyway.

She puts a hand on her shoulder, pushing her back down onto the gritty tile. "Stay down," she says, soft but firm. "Whatever kind of gas dragons use to light their fire, it was enough to knock you out cold -- we have absolutely no idea what kind of compound it was, so we didn't know what kind of damage it did to you. Also, she kind of singed off your eyebrows, so you might have to pencil those in until they grow back. Your clothes caught fire, sorry, we had to get them off."

Oh. Well, that explains why she's in the shower, and the naked part. She does feel tenderized, hot shooting pain on an epidermal level across her collarbones and face. Somewhere, she becomes aware of the sound of Hey Girl braying, loud, warbling calls of distress.

"Percy's trying to calm the damn thing down," Annabeth says, like she can read her mind. "She freaked out when you just keeled over like that. I think this officially means dragons can become attached to humans, what do you think?"

She snaps her fingers in front of Rachel's face, getting her to track the movement. Breathing has eased marginally, probably helped by the fact the full force of the shower is not directly pounding down on her anymore, diluted across Annabeth's shoulders and through her hair, hanging down in wet strands around her face and sending splotches of water exploding across her skin like rain on dust-dry sand. There's a lot of grout clambering up the corners of the shower stall, she thinks idly. That can't be sanitary.

"You know," Annabeth continues. "It did satisfy an unhealthy amount of curiosity to finally learn that you're a natural redhead. I'd always wondered."

This spurs Rachel into action, because hello, talk about mortifying situations; she's lying naked on the floor of Percy and Annabeth's shower, after they had to strip her of her burning clothes while she lolled around unconscious, and now Annabeth's in here with her to make sure she's not dying, and she's also practically naked. Her head feels sodden, too heavy, rolling forward on her neck as she shoves herself into a sitting position, ignoring Annabeth's vocalized protests. 

"Of course it's natural," she says defensively, and her voice comes out a harsh, low smoker's rasp. Oh, god, had she inhaled an unknown number of lethal toxins? Her chest certainly felt like it, hard and too tight.

"Take it easy," Annabeth soothes lowly, her hands snagging at Rachel's and pinning one of them between her own, holding it trapped like a bird between her palms. Her pruned, wrinkled-up fingertips are chilled from the water. It's strangely touchy, for Annabeth. "I don't want to call an ambulance out here, because I'm not sure how I can explain dragonfire. _Percy!"_ she yells, loud enough that Rachel flinches back, and the bathroom rings with the force of it. "Iris-call Michael Yew, will you? He might know what to do, he's the only that tended to Clarisse's wounds after she fought that dragon six years ago."

"Yeah!" Percy calls back. "Is she okay?"

"She's awake!" Annabeth answers, and there's something there, something fragile and a little wavering, shaky like a table missing a leg, and Rachel stills, pays attention to it, because she's never had it directed at her before. She watches Annabeth's face, the wetness streaming down through her eyelashes, making her grey eyes appear misty, see-through, and far too deep.

The corner of her mouth quirks, but it doesn't hold. "What?" she goes, quieter. "Don't look at me like that. You scared the ever-living crap out of us, going down like that. I wasn't sure if you were going to get up again."

"I didn't --" Rachel starts, but she's not quite sure what she means.

Annabeth must read something into it, because she laughs, and it's like a quake, tremulous and a little scary. "You didn't think we actually cared that much? Trust us, we do. If you ever ask him, Percy might insist that we only keep you around for your cell phone and your ability to read street signs, but you're one of us, Rachel, and I don't think you ever see it. You always think there's this divide, between you and the half-bloods, and we're here to tell you that the fact you're a mortal doesn't matter in the least. We -- we wouldn't know what to do without you."

In the aftermath of this, it feels like that moment in which you lose a radio station, or the audio off a television channel: an unexpected blip and then silence, and you're waiting, poised, for everything to come back, that heartbeat between deafness and hearing. Rachel holds her breath, reads so many things in Annabeth's eyes right then.

Later, if anybody asks, she'll blame what she does next on the fact she just rather impressively lost consciousness.

She tightens her grip on Annabeth's hand and tugs her in before she can get her bearings, catching her free hand against her soggy, water-darkened hair and using it to hold her still, mouthing at her cold lips in a kiss.

Annabeth makes a sound, startled, and Rachel's about to pull back and say something meaningful, like, "thank you," or, "there's nothing in this world worth looking at if I don't see you and Percy in it, together and happy," but then Annabeth grabs hold of her by the shoulders and pushes her head _back,_ hitting the tile with a thump, and kisses back, fierce and free and like she faced dragonfire for it.

_This is kissing,_ points out the rational part of Rachel's brain, unperturbed by this turn of events that's turned everything else to white noise. _Actual kissing, with someone who wants to kiss you back._

It's strange, how Rachel can live to be twenty-one years old and not have known this, the weight of Annabeth settling onto her, thighs on either side of her hips and hands gripping her upper arms so tight she'll probably have bruises to match the ones Percy's always giving Annabeth. This is what they mean when they say _hot,_ when they say _turn-on,_ they're talking about this, this flood of heat and want that sets Rachel's fingertips alive with feeling; every brush against Annabeth's skin leaves her hyper-sensitive. They're both clammy, shivering, but it's unbelievable, the _heat_ of a naked person pressed all up against you for the first time.

It's like talking with someone, and listening to them voice something, something you thought nobody else but yourself had ever thought before, and it floors you, absolutely floors you to hear it coming out of someone else's mouth, and you want to point and shout, _yes, that! Exactly that!_

_Exactly this,_ Rachel thinks, like the spinning of gravity and earth, like the flush that rises up in her when she's got an idea for an artwork, as Annabeth pulls away to murmur at the hollow of her throat, "I'm sorry if you ever thought I didn't like you. I just ... I just had to be sure he was mine before I could share him."

_I've wanted you before I ever realized I wanted anybody,_ she thinks and can't articulate, not with the tightness in her chest and the velocity spinning in her head, so she just grabs hold of Annabeth's face and holds her still for another kiss.

 

**eight.**

See, the thing is. At the time, the thought process that lead her to stealing a dead girl's pegasus and flying to certain death had been incredibly simple: 1) she'd already piloted a helicopter, and she'd heard you needed insane amount of training to do that, so she wasn't yet done feeling like a hero, and 2) Kronos had just been destroyed, and the two people she cared about the most (although at the time, she definitely cared about Percy more, but hindsight now has her heart pounding in remembered fear for Annabeth, too) were still alive, and in gratitude for that fact, Rachel would have agreed to anything.

But it wasn't like you needed to twist her arm to get her to be the Oracle. At fifteen, it hadn't seemed like she was giving anything up at all. It'd sounded like the answer to the kind of question some people never figure out: what is everything leading to, what does it _mean,_ what have I been put on this earth to do.

Finally, _finally,_ she'd uncovered the truth behind her eerie visions, behind why she was able to see through the Mist, and that idea, the one that said this fate had been specially designed for _her_ (or maybe she had been specially designed for it) had made it so very easy to insist that she become the new virgin Oracle of Delphi.

And back then, the virginity clause had looked like lower-case, the kind of fine print concerning terms and conditions that everybody skips when installing new software. After all, Rachel was fifteen, and unlike boys at that age, sex seemed very, very unimportant, and talking about it was like discussing the finer complexities of plumbing: she just really couldn't bring herself to care. She'd had her first kiss (although, again, in hindsight, it wasn't much of an achievement: Percy shocked and fish-lipped under her mouth did not a romantic tale make,) so it seemed like the most important milestone had been reached, and who needed the rest of it anyway? They were probably doing everybody a favor by signing her on to be the Olympian equivalent of a nun: she was still a little squirmy about the thought of tampons, and she managed to gag herself on everything, from spoons to toothbrushes, so honestly, keeping her off the market would save her a lot of future embarrassment.

Six years and odd change later, and while Rachel still accidentally gags herself on her toothbrush, she's just really starting to grasp just how much the whole godsdamn world revolves around sex, and it's like she's sitting alone at a table in the lunchroom as one-by-one, all her friends go over to the cool kids table. And she has to sit by herself, less by choice like some people and more by contract, and it chafes in a way she hadn't considered at fifteen.

She _hates_ it, that horrible little drop in her stomach when she sees the imprint of teeth on the underside of Annabeth's jaw, knowing how bad she _wants_ that for herself, and forever being unable to have it, not with Annabeth, not with Percy, not with anyone she'll ever meet, ever love. Signing on to eternal virginity doesn't actually stop lust, and that seems like a very, very stupid mistake for the higher power in charge of these things to make.

And anyway, where do the Olympians get off, making virginity a clause of _anything?_ Sure, it makes some kind of sense for devotees or Athena or Hestia, and definitely for the Hunters of Artemis, but for Apollo? No. Pot, kettle, meet the color black.

In a historical context, it also makes sense, because things probably weren't very nice for young girls in ancient Greece, and to be able to say "touch me and _die"_ and have it actually mean something would have been cool, especially if it protected that oracle from Apollo, too, but in the modern day, it's just _restricting._

All year, Rachel dreams about kids -- younger and younger each time, though she knows that's more subjective, since she's the one getting older and older -- looking terrified and screaming and sometimes bleeding, doing impossible things for their godly parents that kids should never have to do, all in the name of honor and glory, and come summer she'll deliver these into cryptic prophecy, watch the kids march off to an end that she can't tell them. She can't even stop them from dying: she can just make it so that afterwards, they beat their heads with their fists and say, "that's what that line meant, I should have seen it sooner, it's all my fault!"

She doesn't even have her art anymore, and somehow, that seems like the biggest loss of all. From the first time Marguerite saw her fingerpainting with the ketchup and the mustard at McDonalds and called Marlon in to see, Rachel thought she'd grow up to be some tortured artist type, never accepting help from her father and always making it on her own merit, living hand-to-mouth in Brooklyn somewhere, and she'd been happy with that.

But like her dreams, her art was directly correlated with her powers, and that right there seemed to suck all the joy out of it, knowing it wasn't actually her talent that led to her "vivid eye for detail and subtle taste of the macabre," as one high school teacher told Mr. Dare, but rather it was just some side-effect of her freaky Olympian thing. Her easel and paints stayed locked in their broom closet out on the terrace, and Marguerite will dust in there once a month or so, coming out looking a little heartbroken each time.

So, yeah, while Rachel may have agreed to this Oracle thing with her whole heart, now she's starting to feel a lot like she did when her father first started pressuring her about St. Clarion's -- mulish, rebellious, young and fierce and just wanting _out._

 

**nine.**

"Is the fact that at some point I'm going to learn how to fly on dragonback too much of a metaphor for my sex life?" Rachel asks, banging back into the living room.

Virginia scrapes dirt out from underneath her nails and doesn't even look up. "In this metaphor, am I supposed to take flying to mean orgasms?"

"I don't know, are orgasms better than the rest of sex?"

"Yes," says Virginia instantly. Rachel eyeballs her sideways, the kind of hairy look you give people who have just announced that something tastes like ass. It's an unspoken, _how the hell do you know?_

Virginia holds her hands up, palms out, making her eyes big and innocent. "Just saying," she protests, and folds a leg up under her on the sofa, her green-painted toenails winking briefly before she tucks them into the warmth of her thighs. She's got a skinny face, narrow features like a bird's, and so many freckles they practically become a mass from a distance. Her mom's from Scotland; she's got an accent that's all falling syllables and a way of looking at you that's all high, wailing winds in the moors -- Virginia's got the same eyes, colorless like there isn't any atmosphere, but the rest of her is her dad; her strawberry-blonde hair and musician's fingers and rock-star attitude.

The Apollo cabin is the second-fullest cabin at Camp (after Hermes, of course) and Virginia's a year younger than Rachel and the first friend she made there once Percy and Annabeth got busy with the making-out thing they did pretty much the entire latter half of that summer.

_My dad's a horn-dog,_ she shrugged, the first time she asked if she could sit on the floor in Rachel's room in the Big House and clean her cross-bow. _I like it quiet, and that's one thing that the Apollo boys aren't._

Apollo is one of the few cabins that's equally balanced between genders, with six boys and six girls (technically, five boys and six girls, since the Stoll twins' friend Lee kicked the bucket several years back, but they still count him for solidarity's sake.) Ares is the other one, but the girls in Aphrodite outnumber the boys three to one, and Demeter is _all_ girls (but there's only three of them, so it's not exactly the best example.) On the other hand, if there are any girls in Hephaestus, they're just as soot-covered and badass as the boys, so Rachel can't tell the difference between them. She thinks it's kind of unfair that way, that the chromosomes of the great Olympian gods are predisposed to go one way or the other. It feels stereotypical.

Nevertheless, she likes Virginia; she's going to school to sing opera -- where better to do it than New York City, right -- and she refuses to let anyone call her Ginny, on the premise that she's a hero and redheaded and her life is too much of a joke already without adding some inconvenient nickname. So she's Virginia to everyone (with the exception of her brothers, who like to call her Vagina and make dirty limericks about it, but that's Apollo boys for you.)

"Does sex feel like flying?" Rachel asks, still shrewdly eyeballing Virginia.

Who looks at her, completely poker-faced. "How should I know? It's your metaphor."

"Unhelpful," she scowls.

"I try, dear. Why on earth are we talking about your sex life, anyway? You don't have one, you're too busy trying to find things that rhyme with 'your life sucks and it's about to get worse' and now you're raising this dragon-child."

"Oh, don't have a sex life, do I?" Rachel raises her eyebrows, assuming a vague expression. Her skin flushes with the memory, like it was just waiting to bring up the sensation of Annabeth pushing her back onto the tiles, slippery, wet, and warm.

Virginia's eyes narrow. "Oh, no you don't. You're not dragging me into some kind of passive-aggressive did or didn't you back-and-forth. Put in the damn DVD already. What horrible tripe did you bring up anyway?"

Rachel tilts the DVD cover in her direction. "I'd thought you might like to see Moonstruck."

"Hmmm," she goes, noncommittally. "The only thing I know about it is that it's set here and it's got Nicholas Cage in it, and at one point he gets violent and yells at a woman to get in his bed."

Rachel ducks her head, because she knows exactly which scene she's talking about. "It's supposed to be romantic," she mumbles.

Virginia snorts. "It falls a little short."

"Men usually do, honey," Rachel says, with a passable attempt at sounding wise, and she pops open the DVD case.

 

**ten.**

"There's going to be a full moon tonight," Thalia falls in beside her when she's in line at the deli, for all intents and purposes materializing out of nowhere.

Rachel stops rifling through her wallet to see if she has an extra one or if she's going to have to pay the difference for her pastrami half-sub using quarters and dimes, and stares. She supposes her life is weird enough by association that she shouldn't be surprised by the abrupt appearance of a quasi-immortal sort-of princess, because hey, it happens. But it's kind of like saying, "yeah, but that was after the Santa with the glue-on beard stood up and mooned the entire mall" -- like, it sounds plausible and it makes for a good story, but it never actually happens in real life.

"Thank you," she manages. The cashier makes a prompting noise, and she startles, fishing a crumpled dollar from behind a receipt for the midnight showing of Captain America and handing it over with a five, before turning back to Thalia. Politely, she asks, "does that mean the Hunt's going to ride tonight?"

The look Thalia gives her could mean anything, really, although the corners of her eyes twitch with impatience. "Are you going to eat that here?" she asks, gesturing to the half-sub that Rachel now holds in her hands.

"Um, actually I was going to walk with it," she goes, gesturing towards the door and folding down a corner of the wax paper wrapping so she can take a bite. It comes back mostly bun, but first bites usually do.

"Good!" Thalia turns on her heel and leads them towards one of the tables in the corner.

Rachel thinks about protesting, but Thalia's already settling into a chair, dragging another one close so she can prop her boots up on it. "Okay, then," she sighs, and takes the seat across from her. "May I ask what this is about, my lady?"

"No need to 'my lady' me," the right-hand Hunter to Artemis says, sounding amused. "On the scale of Olympian importance, your master ranks higher than my mistress, no matter the fact they were born on the same day --" the way she says it makes it seem like Artemis will never, ever forget this, nor let anyone around her forget it either. "-- so technically, I should be the one 'my lady'ing you."

"Oh, please don't," Rachel goes around a mouthful of pastrami. "I don't do anything useful besides dream a little and talk in a funny voice. That's hardly worth any special treatment."

Thalia laughs at that; a full-throated, grown-woman laugh, which sounds odd coming out of her immortally-young body. "It's the full moon tonight, Rachel," she says again.

"So you've said."

"Hmmm. You know, I've always thought it kind of ironic, that the full moon is when my lady Artemis is at her strongest, but nights of the full moon have always been the best nights for lovers."

Rachel looks over at her, not quite sure what her relevance to this conversation is.

"It's going to be a lover's moon tonight," Thalia continues, softer and more thoughtful. "You know, the big kind, bright and low and big enough to fall into. It's the kind of moon to drive people crazy. It's going to be a night for confessions, do you understand?"

"Yes," says Rachel, who doesn't really.

"Good," Thalia nods, her tiara catching at the light in little winking glimpses. "Got any plans for tonight?"

"Not really. I mean, I'm going over to Percy and Annabeth's because they're going out somewhere and they want me to babysit the dragon."

Thalia laughs that grown-up laugh again. "That thing practically is their kid, isn't it?"

Rachel smiles. "Sure, I guess, except she's a bit toothier, and when she shits, it's usually flaming."

 

**eleven.**

Later that night, with the harvest moon hanging right outside like a great jaundiced eyeball, Rachel flips on the light in the bathroom. She can hear Annabeth and Percy moving about in the living room, talking to each other lowly with Hey Girl cheeping at them like she's trying to join in on the conversation. She's already in her pajamas, planning to do nothing for the rest of the night but laze around on the sofa and watch Cupcake Wars on the Food Network and keep Hey Girl curled up close like her own personal space heater, so she's kind of tuning everything out, looking at herself vaguely as she brushes her teeth.

She's idly tugging at the ends of her hair with the hairbrush, counting to thirty and swishing mouthwash around at the same time, when Percy appears in the bathroom doorway.

She smiles at his reflection, bending to spit. "You guys going, then?" she asks, straightening again.

Percy doesn't reply at first, and they watch each other in the mirror, long enough for Rachel to feel a little awkward-turtle. He's not really dressed for a date, she can't help but notice -- he's dressed in the same pair of sweatpants and unisex Owl City shirt that he'd been wearing when she came over, and she has an odd moment where she kind of wants to lean against the sink and say, "hey, I made out with your girlfriend in the shower right there, which you probably already know about because if there's any couple that keeps secrets from each other, I don't think that you and Annabeth are it." But she doesn't, because at that moment, Percy speaks.

"You know," he goes, and there's something frayed in his voice that snags at Rachel's attention. "The first time I fell in love with you, you had a hairbrush."

Her heart trip-hammers, like he physically struck her hard enough to stop her heart. Her fingers tighten around the handle of Annabeth's hairbrush, and then she turns around, because this seems like something she needs to face the real boy for.

"The first time?" she goes, not quite levelly.

He looks almost as unbalanced by his declaration as she does, but he sets his mouth and steps into the bathroom; the movement puts them both up against the sink, close enough that their toes are almost brushing. They've been in this kind of proximity more times than she can count, but never has she felt it as much as she does now.

"Do you ever think," he goes, quiet, like he knows the whole world is listening in on this moment. "That we fall in love with the same person more than once?"

She doesn't look away from him. "How many times have you fallen in love with me?"

"The first time was when you saved my life, this mortal girl throwing a hairbrush at a Titan. The second time was at Montauk, when --" when you kissed me, his eyes are telling her; they're standing close enough that she can see the tick his eyes make as they jump back and forth between her own. "And after that ..." he lifts his shoulder in a shrug. "Every time you lend me your notes for Bio, without ever making me feel like I'm too slow or far behind to understand it. Every time you come over without even wanting to know why. Every time I make you laugh, every time..." he trails off, shrugging his shoulders helplessly again, like he's run into things too infinitesimal to list.

Rachel isn't quite sure what to say. Well, no, that's a lie: it's there, she can feel it, bubbling hot and warm inside her chest, but she doesn't know if she can coherently put it into words without sounding like an idiot.

Which, what does that matter, anyway? Don't think, she thinks at herself. Be brave, just do it.

"I'm not quite sure if I agree with you," she says evenly, watches his eyes flare open in that abject-terror look and reaches out, putting a hand over his heart to settle him before he takes flight. "About falling in love with someone more than once, because -- because -- because, you see, I don't think I ever stopped being in love with you." If anything, his eyes widen further, and she hastens on. "Becoming the Oracle just kind of diverted it for awhile, but it never really goes away, not really."

His hand comes up, catching her own and pinning it there against his sternum. His knuckles carry the same shiny-burn marks that hers do -- hazards of raising dragons, she thinks, smiling, and once she starts smiling, it's like she can't stop.

The other hand comes up, fingertip catching against one of the combed-out twists of her hair, and for a dizzy moment, Rachel feels as if her entire existence suddenly narrows down to that single point of contact, there at the tip of Percy's finger as it drops, trailing downward and touching briefly against her cheek and jaw, that single static moment of falling. She's like a penny dropped down a well -- falling, falling, everything dark and shrinking except for Percy, the only source of light.

It strikes her, then: this is one of those moments. This is one of those moments that the whole plot of the movie hinges on, the single moment that you read an entire book to get to, that heartbeat where you realize you're only two moves away from checkmate and there's nothing your opponent can do to stop it from happening.

Suddenly, Rachel feels made of nothing but nerve endings; her lips feel like they're twice as big as they really are, tingling with the knowledge that this is the kind of moment that ends in a kiss.

"Please put the hairbrush down, ma'am," Percy whispers, and she does, immediately, puts it somewhere to the side; she think she hears it clatter into the sink basin, but she can't quite be sure, because the next trip-hammer of her heart, she's got her arms around his neck and her mouth on his.

Percy's hands grab at her, skittering over her waist and her elbows and finally up the wings of her shoulder blades, pulling her in. His mouth changes angle and then opens, and just like that, they're _kissing;_ the kind of kissing she watched so enviously on movie nights with Virginia, the kind of kissing she imagined real people kissed like, without a thought to how silly they looked, licking at each other's slack-lipped mouths like puppies, and she doesn't give a thought to how she looks now, not when Percy's spinning her around so that she's pinned up against the sink.

She puts her feet on top of his, using that small leverage to boost herself up so she can sit on the edge of the counter, using it to hold her weight so she can push herself harder into the kiss. Her chest lifts into his at every breath.

They break apart for air and come back before they've even found it. Percy kisses her like it's an answer, joyful and loud, teeth pressed up against hers, smile-for-smile.

"Hey, kelp-head," comes Annabeth's acid tone from the doorway. "Way to fail, I thought we had a plan."

Rachel comes back down to earth with a brief thump, but the sight of Annabeth standing there with her arms crossed and her eyebrows raised didn't inspire anything in her except a knee-weakening kind of relief, because this is better, like this. Percy and Annabeth shouldn't do life-altering things without the other being there, it just didn't make sense. They're practically the same person, everyone knows that; you can't have one without the other. They go together or not at all.

"Yeah, but it's Rachel," goes Percy in reply, shoulders sheepishly up around his ears, but he's still got her pinned up against the sink with his hips and thighs, so Rachel takes this as a good sign. "I kind of got carried away."

"I noticed," Annabeth says, ever dry, stepping in to join them. They open their stance for her, easily, automatically, like that's what they were meant to do all along. "And after all that hard work persuading Thalia to find Rachel and pointedly drop all kinds of hints about full moons and confessions."

"What hard work? You left a note on her Facebook wall," Percy falls easily into their banter. "I hardly call that hard work."

"Minor details," Annabeth waves this off, and then fixes her grey-eyed gaze right on Rachel. "We mean it, you know. What I said in the shower, what he said to you just now. Every single word."

Not trusting herself, Rachel just kind of nods, but Annabeth seems to get it, because she reaches out, sliding one hand along the elastic waist-band of Percy's sweatpants, and the other right against the skin just under the hem of Rachel's tank top.

"Do you trust us?" she asks, and they are warm, so very warm, the kind of warm Rachel hasn't even realized until right this second.

_They never told me it could be like this,_ she thinks, and, "yeah," she says, reaching out to catch Annabeth, holding her steady enough to kiss, Percy's shoulders framing them like the corners of the world.

 

**twelve.**

She wakes up just the once in the night, with nothing but the big, blue-cheese moon outside the window. It's bright enough that she can't even see the shadow of Hey Girl underneath the bedroom door, though she knows she has to be there, claws tucked up against her glowing belly and smoke lazily spiraling from her nostrils.

On the bedside table, within arm's reach, there's the phone, a notepad of yellow post-its, and a Sharpie.

It hits her then, the way nothing has before, a swooping inside of her ribs like she's falling away from something, and she sits up, grabbing the Sharpie. It squeaks a little as she twists off the cap, but neither Percy nor Annabeth stir, not even when she flips over onto her side and puts the felt tip of the pen to their skin. She draws in long strokes and deep swirls, crossing from Annabeth's thigh to Percy's hip, up his back and across the wings of his shoulder blades, onto the curve of Annabeth's bicep. She draws something that might be flowers, might be something tribal-esque, or might just be moonlight, beams of it and rays stretching everywhere, illuminating them in broad lines like a signature.

When she's done, neither of them have stirred beyond a sleepy horse-twitch when she brushed against some ticklish spot, and she smiles to herself, pulling her leg up to her and drawing the simplest smiley face on the inside of her knee.

 

**thirteen.**

The next morning, everything is crystalline and cold, even the sunlight coming in through the buildings in brief flashes like a gasp of breath. It's really too cold and too far to be walking home, but Rachel didn't want to wake Marlon up, or take a cab. She doesn't want to bother anyone right now. She doesn't want to talk to anyone. It'd be too strange, it'd be too normal; it feels like all the world should be still and quiet right now, not full of people doing their everyday things, not when everything in all creation has changed. 

It all feels too big, and too private. She needs the world to herself right now.

There's a Mountain Dew can in the gutter when she steps off the curb. She kicks at it, sending it skittering across the pavement, far enough off of her path that she'd have to intentionally have to follow it in order to kick it again.

While she's debating the merit of this, a man walks by on the other side of the street, walking a burly-shouldered, squat-legged bulldog. He's got a scarf wrapped so tightly around his face that only the line of his brow is visible, full and broad and red like a salami. The wind picks up and he nestles his face further into his scarf, quickening his pace enough that it eats up all the slack on the leash.

Rachel doesn't feel the cold at all, and thinks it's a little odd, the hunched-up man hustling around the block like the wind is chasing him away. She kicks the can again, losing it down a storm drain.

This is it, she thinks, and it is, it is, it's exactly like flying, a weightlessness in her fingertips, a pressure inside her chest like there are wings caged in by her ribs. This is really what being in love is like.

And to think she would have given this up, lived a long long live just dreaming dreams, and never known that there was a difference between just dreaming a dream and living one. It seems impossible now, that she ever could have stayed on that side of the line now that she's on the other.

Rachel Elisabeth Dare is in love. Head over heels in love, and last night Percy Jackson and Annabeth Chase cornered her in a bathroom and then pulled her into bed with them.

She's also pretty sure this is the morning she'll die.

 

**fourteen.**

Eventually, she takes a cab because there are places in Queens you just don't walk through no matter the time of day, and if the cabbie gives yesterday's pajamas a knowing look, it's easy to ignore.

She winds up in Central Park, because if her lord Apollo's going to come and vaporize her for sexing away her mystical Oracle powers, then she might as well get vaporized surrounded by cardinal song and Christmas lights. She figures that this, if nothing else, makes her more like a half-blood than she's ever been: she had a fantastic last night on earth, drew for the first time in years, and she's going to die with her chin up. They might even make her a shroud, if she's lucky.

Noon comes and noon goes, which is odd, because noon's the point in the day when Apollo's power is the strongest. Maybe he hasn't gotten the memo yet, but that can't be: if sex has anything to do with it, you can be sure that Apollo's paying attention. So where is he, then?

Hope is smaller than love: it trembles inside of her, a buoying pocket of warmth, something she wants to cup her hands around and hold.

Maybe this is it, she thinks. Maybe this is all that's going to happen. She'll lose her powers, they'll find some other young, pretty thing who's been dreaming dreams all her life and can see boys with swords, and they'll make her the Oracle, and Rachel can have this. This happily ever after with the only two people she ever wants to dream about.

At 1:31, her phone rings. Her hand's shaking when she pulls it out, and it smugly tells her that it's too sexy for its shirt.

"Hello," she answers, hope and cardinal call and the beating of dragon wings, ever-lifting, ever-falling.

 

**fifteen.**

She finds them immediately, like everybody else has suddenly gone mute and monochrome and they're the only things in color, the two of them, sitting on the fountain outside the bank on the other side of the zebra walk. There's no water in the fountain at this time of year, just a coating of frost glittering out of the cracks and grooves of the statue that the sun hasn't quite gotten to yet.

Annabeth's got her head in Percy's lap, tucked into the groove where his thigh meets his hip in that unselfconscious way that lovers do. He's got his head down, watching her as she talks at him animatedly, her hands moving and her eyelashes blinking away the light. He bounces the leg he's got crooked around her, and she smacks at him, not even breaking stride. They've got no gloves on, their knuckles gone bright-red from the cold, but when the sleeves of Annabeth's coat lifts, Rachel can see the beginning of the artwork she'd inked into her flesh, peeking out from underneath the cuff. Hey Girl sniffs around the fountain rim in ecstatic excitement, and whatever the Christmas shoppers see through the Mist when they look at her, it makes them smile.

Percy looks up and around, like they're waiting for someone. The light changes.

It's Christmas Eve. Rachel steps off the curb and walks across the street, winter sun fractal bright in the sky like prism light.

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
